Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency briefing from 22 August 1952 presents the Office of Scientific Intelligence review of the Air Force flying saucer investigation, with attachments dated 14 and 19 August. It traces sightings from 1947 and explains most as balloons, aircraft, astronomical bodies or atmospheric effects. About 20% remain unexplained. The briefing rules out US or Soviet weapons and space ships. Its main concerns are psychological warfare, false alerts to air defense, and civilian saucer groups.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# O O unidentified objects. Planes had orders not to shoot. Now, let's examine for a moment what all these people claim to have seen. Grouped broadly as visual, radar, and combined visual and radar, ATIC has two major visual classes — first, spherical or elliptical objects, usually of bright metallic lustre, some small (2 or 3 feet across) most estimated at 100 foot diameter and a few 1000 feet wide. There are variants in this group, such as torpedos, triangulars, pencils, even mattress-shaped. These are all daylight reportings. The second visual group, all night reporting, consists of lights and various luminosities, such as green, flaring-red or blue-white fire balls, moving points of light, and luminous streamers. Both categories are reported as single objects, in non-symmetrical groups and in formations of varying numbers. Reported characteristics include three general levels of speed: hovering; noderate, as with a conventional aircraft; and stupendous, up to 18,000 miles per hour in the White Sands incident. Violent nancouvering was reported in somewhat less than 105. Accelerations have been given as high as 20 c's. With few exceptions, there has been a
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 29 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.